


i love you never felt like any blessing

by wanderNavi



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: All hurt no comfort, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, Gen, Unreliable Narrator, complete abandonment of canon’s sequence of events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29031252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: Azula and her uncle sit on opposite sides of an unbreakable wall: she had killed her brother, and he had killed his.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	i love you never felt like any blessing

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “Heavy in Your Arms” by Florence + the Machine. 
> 
> Taking the [Chauser style](https://anghraine.tumblr.com/post/145320294168/chaucer-meme) for a spin again. Basically: seven parts, each with seven sentences.

### 第一集

The war doesn’t end when Sozin’s Comet arrives; it doesn’t end when eight months later, Azula strikes and Zuko falls.

This is for the glory and good of her nation, for her people sinking into the mire of civil war, for her war which demands the unconditional loyalty of its people to its crown. If she cannot weed out treachery from her own family, how could her nation possibly follow her lead?

Her brother doesn’t bleed as he falls. Maybe he should have. Maybe the ground should have shaken with the impact, with his so-called destiny collapsing.

Her education had no room for spirits and dragons, only might and power and siblings pitted against each other.

### 第二集

Azula isn’t the youngest Fire Lord – that honor goes towards an infant yanked around like a puppet by his regent generations ago – and she refuses to go the way of her predecessors, assassinated and usurped. It’s her throne and it’s her right to guard it, and it’s her right to seize the glory of the world under her flag.

Prince Iroh had as good as abdicated the crown six years ago, so how dare he now invite enemies onto Fire Nation soil, kill Fire Nation lives, and destroy Fire Nation fields for his pursuit of a throne he’d sooner burn to ashes than sit upon? How dare the armies retreat against her command and come pouring back onto her shores under a traitor’s banner? How dare he threaten her country with a swift descent into a deep humiliation that would last centuries, that would last an eternity; he would tear apart in one swift year the long labor of decades building the Fire Nation’s glory to the sky, toppled over in fatal defeat and shattered beyond repair.

Gritting her teeth, she gathers what officers that remain who still lie to her face about their loyalties, that haven’t left yet, and sends them into battle against the rebellion, and may Agni have mercy upon those who do not emerge from their clashes victorious because Azula has no mercy for such useless traitors.

Azula and her uncle sit on opposite sides of an unbreakable wall: she had killed her brother, and he had killed his.

### 第三集

The last time Azula saw the Avatar, he was: small; shaking, not with fear; flanked by his allies; shouting, not with anger, “He was your brother, didn’t you care?”

“Of course I cared, he was in my way,” Azula sneered.

The earthbender, the only one of the Avatar’s little posse who isn’t consistently useless, cut off any further conversation with a hitch in her wrists and a sand trap several meters large under Azula’s feet, hungry dirt ready to swallow her whole chasing after her evasive leap. The Water Tribe nuisances arrived with reinforcements in the forms of spears of ice hurled down from the humid skies thanks to half a dozen men in blue and the girl who had been at dear Zuzu’s side. The girl who had desperately dragged him away with one hand pressed hard against his wrist, against his neck, searching, while her other hand did its damnedest to amputate Azula through massive frostbite.

Sometimes Azula’s soldiers bring in reports of the Kyoshi Warriors, escaped from prison and fighting a coward’s fight; they sabotage supply lines, pick off stray patrols, and melt back into the forests in a constant evasive retreat that no self-respecting fighter would.

They all fight like that now – Earth Kingdom, the rebels, the Water Tribe sailors, enemies, all her enemies – after the charred winter, and Azula grimly decides none of them deserve a sentence as soft as imprisonment anymore; she’ll execute all her enemies.

### 第四集

(Azula never asked what happened to Lady Ursa: the woman is dead or as good as dead, gone from her life with the last words exchanged between them being a mother’s stern command to return to bed and an almost sarcastically thrown, “Good night.” There were more important matters always at hand – her training, her missions, her perfect poise as a royal princess. Azula isn’t Zuko, entangled with the past and ideas like soft playthings for toothless babies, filled to the brim with mistakes and an inability to accept the right order of things and thus seize victory.)

(“Phoenix King,” Fire Lord Ozai declared for history to hear and tremble under his might and lay itself prostrate before his feet to lavishly venerate his deeds. He went to the Earth Kingdom, stayed in the Earth Kingdom, and never came back from the Earth Kingdom; his horrid brother denying the right to a proper funeral at the palace. The last exchange between Azula and her father had been the long shadow cast by a turned back and the sting from the lash of a dismissive reprimand.)

Standing at the entrance to her command tent, Azula glares at the mud and the sickness present at every battle and every army camp and curses the spirits that contrived for the Avatar to survive the lightning strike she knew, she knew, _she knew_ was lethal.

### 第五集

More defections, more revolts, more assassination attempts, more useless cowards – dead weight dragging her down with malicious intent because they all want to plunge her glory and honor into the dead darkness. She trusts in their untrustworthiness.

Another general loses a fight to the traitors and insurgents and enraged, she has him denounced for treason – because he must be conspiring against her too – and executed within the week. “There is no place for defeat,” she tells his replacement.

(More defections, more revolts, more assassination attempts – Azula stands deaf and blind to the discontent and the empty stomachs and the low morale of men and women on edge, waiting for the next swing of the executioner’s heavy sword. There are no riches, no wheat nor rice nor meat, to be extracted from the ashen Earth Kingdom decimated when winter struck and the southern lands weren’t able to produce nearly enough to feed the famished north. With nothing to gain from fighting the Earth Kingdom and everything to lose from fighting the forces of the Dragon of the West, the soldiers assess their prospects and send a prayer to the spirits that their families and friends still remaining at the home islands won’t be hunted down and executed for their desertion.)

### 第六集

Draped in a blue cloak of lightning, Azula lashes out and out and out against whips of water and hurled boulders and dancing gusts of cutting wind, against pressure squeezing down on her neck. Rocks ground her lightning and water directs it away and most vexing of all, the Avatar _catches_ her blue bolts and flings them crackling away into the sky where they won’t hit anyone.

There are vulgar conspiracies all around her, wishing her humiliation, her death, her ruin and Azula refuses to submit to her opponents’ attempts to restrain her; Fire Lord Azula refuses to bow her head to anyone.

The full force of the Avatar State comes bearing down upon her: heavy water, heavy stone, the whole world screams at his command. And Azula heaves in lungsful of charged air – the air is not hers, he steals it – and feels the pounding blood in her veins – the blood is not hers, the girl steals it – and grinds her feet into the dirt to brace herself – the earth is not hers.

The hand on her heart, the hand on her forehead, the light (his expression when the white glow clears, the pinch of his brows and the grimace that comes unbidden when he looks at her face and sees), it _hurts_.

Then Iroh arrives.

### 第七集

She hurls them, ammunition to crush bone and fling men off their feet, “Zuko’s dead; Mother’s dead; Father’s dead; Lu Ten’s dead; Aunt Zuyou’s dead; _they’re all dead_.”

And so here lies her family, all that is left in the dance around the throne sinking all of them into blood red waters like an anchor at the end of the chains fate tied their lives together with and the questions lodged like an undigested stone in their bellies: Who will sit on it, who are the heirs to it?

“Without firebending, you can never become Fire Lord again,” the Dragon of the West says and has the gall to look tired, to look down upon Azula with –

He says, “Your reign is over. It is time for this war to be over too.”

Azula screams in defiance, “You’ll ruin the Fire Nation.”

(And Iroh, feeling every one of his years, says, “Perhaps I already have.”)

**Author's Note:**

> Going by my WIPs spreadsheet, I seem to have a preoccupation with civil war in the Fire Nation.
> 
> Want to chat about ATLA? Find me on Tumblr at [marginal-notes](https://marginal-notes.tumblr.com).


End file.
